Your method relies on a sort, which may or may not be one reason you run out of space/time.
The canonical way to remove duplicates is to keep a hash map of the keys (an object in JS). The object keys you get back won't necessarily be in the order you want; you don't specify if you want the results ordered as well, but they are now.
You could null
out the original array, since you no longer require it; when it gets collected is up to the JS engine though.
You could remove duplicates "in place" by keeping a "current index" into the sorted array, and increment it only when you move a non-duplicated element "down" from the counter index, then truncate the array that you return.
Combining the last two techniques should mean that in general you'll only have a single array with a valid reference.
Edit Example. Setting length
explicitly, as .slice()
creates a new array.
var have = {};
var arr = [9, 9, 111, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7];
arr = arr.sort();
for (var rIdx = 0, i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
if (have[arr[i]]) {
arr[rIdx++] = arr[i];
} else {
have[arr[i]] = true;
}
}
arr.length = rIdx;
console.log(arr);